Voicemail nightmare

I'm out of the SA right now (and on sms roaming) and won't be able to get back in until borders are fully opened again. I received an sms early today that my voicemail will be deactivated in a day if I don't access it (the first and only warning I ever received). So, I try to access it by:

1. Dial your own Vodacom Number (including country code) from any phone that can make international calls ie. +27 82 ******X 2. Immediately press 1 while your voicemail 'leave a message after the beep' greeting is playing 3. Enter your 4 digit voicemail password (1111 by default or as set by you) 4. Listen to and manage all your voicemail messages as usual.

THAT DOESN'T WORK AS THE VOICEMAIL WON'T ACCEPT MY PASSWORD. So, I reset the password to default by dialing *111# and navigating to the screen where I can reset my password. I reset the password to the default (1111 right?) and repeat the steps 1 - 4 further above again and now the default password is rejected.

It takes forever to get help from a live person when I phone customer care and given that I'm overseas, it is costing me a small fortune so that is a non-starter. Your Vodacom forum doesn't work properly when I search for similar issues on the forum the results say similar posters have had similar issues regarding Voicemail and there is a solution to the problem solved BUT I can't see the supposed solution as it looks like your internet community forum is broken/ not working like it should. If I use the support functionality on your community forum I get put through to a chatbot that can't help or I get told no live chat agents are available.

I've also tried dialing +278214 and then my number as has been suggest on other places online and again, no luck. Some help would be greatly appreciated as I can't get back into SA and my voicemail is the only thing letting people know that I'm out of the country when they call me...